Home Flood Insurance Increases May Come

23-6-2008

Despite the overall weakening of the real estate market both in the UK and USA, the insured value and certainly the cost to rebuild properties has maintained an annual growth rate that is expected to lead to an increase of around 30-50% of their total value over the next 10 years. This is according to reports published in certain online insurance news websites lately. It is also suggested that the insurance industry is to be encouraged to increase advertising to encourage more British home owners in flood prone areas to take out flood and other natural disaster cover. Reports online indicate that uptake of this catagory of insurance is far lower in flood prone regions than the government would like to see.

This is by no means a certainty, but based on trends the cost to rebuild homes damaged by floods, cyclones, hurricanes, earth quakes, tremors and even burst water pipes is going up!

The fact is that the price of fossil fuels have not gone down if you look at historical data, on the contrary the price of fuel always goes up due to the fact that we have almost depleted the worlds fossil fuels.

Fuel prices have a direct bearing on the cost of building works, parts, transport and manufacture of the hardware needed to do the work. Even many local hardware supplier have as recently as last month added a fuel surcharge for diesel to their delivery cost.

Natural flood defences have been all but completely destroyed by development on countryside land and by clearing fields for farming. When it rains the water has no where left to go and floods are going to stay a part of our lives from now on.

In the UK areas in Gloucestershire have now been classified as flood danger areas as have parts of Florida and the Mississippi coastal counties. Galveston in Texas has a five yearly extreme caution and just two years ago the entire region had to be evacuated.

We all remember the floods in Cornwall. The Boscastle flood of 2004 occurred on the 16 August in 2004. Two villages; Boscastle and Crackington Haven in Cornwall, suffered extensive damage after a flash flood caused by an exceptional amount of rain that fell over the course of five hours that afternoon. The Boscastle flooding was caused by rainfall which the river could not hold.

The floods were the worst in local memory. A study commissioned by the Environment Agency from a firm called HR Wallingford concluded that it was among the most extreme ever experienced in Britain.

While the scientific debate over the effects of global warming on the frequency and severity of hurricanes, sea levels and our ozone remain inconclusive, as a Nation the British are intelligent enough to realise the worst has not yet hit us and the government needs to take drastic action to protect our interests

Insurers have already raised their charges and costs to insurer a house have spiralled for home owners. Those in areas marked as high risk were deemed to be in low risk areas 40 years ago and the trends seem to indicate it will only get harder for home owners.